Shiites Mourn Death of Cleric in Iraq Bombing

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

Published: August 31, 2003

NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 30 — A tide of grief surged through this holy city today as thousands of Shiite Muslim mourners poured in from throughout Iraq, walking silently to the corner of the sacred shrine where their revered spiritual leader was assassinated.

The funeral for the slain ayatollah, Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who was killed outside the Imam Ali Mosque here along with 81 others by a huge car bomb on Friday, is to start Sunday in Baghdad and travel around the center of the country.

But there is no body for the funeral, said his nephew, who is also a cleric.

All that was readily identifiable were parts of the black turban that marked the ayatollah as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, and a couple of prayer books, the nephew, Amar Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, said in an interview.

"The occupation forces bear full responsibility for this due to their misguided methods in treating the security situation," said the cleric, sitting just off the slain ayatollah's prayer room, which was draped with yards of black cloth.

Hospital officials had at first put the death toll as high as 95, but they adjusted it downward today.

The police investigating the attack, the worst since the government of Saddam Hussein fell, said the explosives used in the booby-trapped car resembled those used in the fatal bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19. They included old mortar shells and other military munitions bundled together, said Gen. Hussein Yassin, the Najaf police chief, and were ignited by remote control.

Four suspects were detained, the police said, but they rejected reports quoting anonymous police sources as saying that the suspects had been carrying identification cards from the former intelligence services or were foreigners. Officials increasingly focused on the theory that the car bomb was the work of members of the toppled government.

The police criticized the ayatollah's bodyguards — there were about 16 with him in various vehicles — for allowing an unknown vehicle to park so close. But the general sentiment is that American forces have failed to ensure security throughout Iraq.

Mr. Hakim, the nephew, said the United States had insisted that the ayatollah disarm his militia, the Badr Brigade, which he had assembled over 23 years in Iran, but that the Americans had not replaced it. Only in the north, where the Kurds have been allowed to provide their own security, does the country have any stability, he said.

The occupying forces had relied on the ayatollah, one of four grand ayatollahs in Iraq, to secure the support of the general population that the occupiers be given at least a year to establish a better government for Iraq. Mr. Hakim said the support of his political group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, would continue.

The ayatollah's brother, Abdel al-Aziz, who sits on the American-sponsored Iraqi Governing Council, is likely to take his place. But the brother's pronouncements do not carry the same religious weight, and it was unclear which senior cleric might fill that role of spiritual guide. The senior clerics in Najaf other than Ayatollah Hakim have a tradition of avoiding politics.

As the size of the blast and the toll sank in, the idea that it might have stemmed from the rivalry pitting Najaf's elderly, revered clerics against a younger more militant group began to fade. The carnage seemed too horrific, the desecration of the shrine right after Friday Prayers too appalling, no matter how high the stakes in the fight for predominance over the Shiite community.

"They want to assassinate one man so they slaughter all these people?" said Barhan Doush, a bank manager in Najaf who lost three cousins in the blast. "It's not against the person alone, it's against the whole religion."

Many argued that it was an attempt to warn the Shiite clergy not to take part in politics. But followers of Moktada al-Sadr, a militant young cleric who would like to model Iraq on the clerical rule next door in Iran, said he would not be deterred and was a viable alternative.

The deaths left many lost and angry, wondering if such violence would prevent the Shiites from gaining a place in ruling Iraq that reflects their 65 percent of the population of 25 million.

"He was the voice of the Shiites," said Mehdi Falah, 30, a laborer from Basra who braved Iraq's dangerous nighttime roads to reach the shrine for the funeral. "We were looking to him to deliver a just, free state." Nothing worse could have happened than the ayatollah's death, he said.

"I feel a deep sense of loss, desperation and despair," he said, sitting on the pavement, exhausted after taking part in a round of ritual mourning. "Nobody will be able to fill the gap he left."

The funeral industry in Najaf has a long history. For centuries, the faithful have believed that being buried next to the tomb of Imam Ali, whose own assassination in the seventh century led to the founding of Shiism, would speed their acceptance into heaven.

But no one could quite remember a single day with so many funerals since the darkest moments of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's.

One side of the shrine seemed to be a continuous stream of coffins, with the relatives of those killed taking the dead on one final visit to the shrine before burying them.

Traditionally they circle Imam Ali's gold-domed tomb inside, but with the shrine closed they contented themselves with laying the coffins on the sidewalk near one doorway.